When you think of Silicon Valley, chances are companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Intel and Hewlett-Packard come to mind.

But Shockley Semiconductor Co. might have been right up there if its founder, William Shockley, hadn’t been such a workplace bully.

That’s one of my takeaways from the fascinating PBS American Experience program Silicon Valley, premiering Feb. 5 (check local listings). The program recounts how “the Valley” came to exist in the late 1950s and ’60s — what director/editor/co-producer Randall MacLowry calls “a revolutionary moment in time.”

Silicon Valley also led me to realize that the way those tech companies bloomed affects the way we work today in five key ways.

It Started With One Abusive Boss

Back to Shockley.

In 1956, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist brought together eight of the nation’s brightest young scientists and engineers to develop a revolutionary technology — the transistor. They all worked together south of San Francisco in California’s Santa Clara Valley, an area best known for its apricot, cherry and almond orchards.

One of Shockley’s key players: Bob Noyce, then a 28-year-old research manager at Philco, who went on to found Intel in 1968. (Read the classic 1983 Tom Wolfe article about Noyce in Esquire.)

But Shockley became increasingly abusive and authoritarian.

His team “knew how good they were, and Shockley was treating them as if they were children,” Michael S. Malone, a veteran Silicon Valley writer and entrepreneur, says in the program. “These guys all joined on the belief that they would stay there forever. And it really took the incredibly bad management skills of Bill Shockley … to alienate them so badly that they would contemplate, just, you know, stepping out the front door into the abyss.”

That’s exactly what happened. Noyce and his colleagues soon defected and formed Fairchild Semiconductor. (You need to watch Silicon Valley to find out why Fairchild didn’t become one of today’s tech giants.)

As Next Avenue blogger Nancy Collamer has noted: High stress levels due to a workplace bully can undermine your performance at work and harm your health. By leaving Shockley, his company's refugees preserved their sanity, maximized their talents and went on to become fabulously rich.

Lessons for Bullied Employees

I asked Malone what lesson the rest of us can learn from the Shockley tale. “The only time you should work for a bully is if he’s a genius and you’re willing to put up with it to succeed in the long run — the classic case was Steve Jobs," Malone says. “Otherwise, leave. Maybe start your own company. Life’s too short.”

When you watch Silicon Valley, you’ll see that Noyce and the other tech pioneers were the catalysts of huge changes in how many of us work, for better and for worse — and I don’t mean the laptops, desktops, cellphones and tablets we use to get our jobs done.